


About Endurance

by Umbralpilot



Category: Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Story within a Story, Technically a sequel, The occasional adorableness thereof, Werecats, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:53:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8882374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: As a pack recovers from a harrowing adventure, a Garou and a Bastet exchange notes on strength and survival.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palmedfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmedfire/gifts).



> So, uh, funny story: Originally, when I saw I got a WtA prompt (YES!!), I was set to write a plotty adventure fic. I'm still writing it! But it got away from me, length-wise, and I realised I'm not going to be able to finish it to the deadline. I also realised though that I'm very fond of the characters and wanted to write some exploration of them, and this story pretty much broke its way out of my brain in a day. So effectively what you're getting here, dear recipient, is the epilogue first. I really hope it works as standalone - I have little choice but to trust my betas on that. But if you enjoy it (which I dearly hope you will!) stay tuned, because the "prequel" is in progress.
> 
> I loved writing this, anyway. A few notes just to orient you: the gameworld this takes place in revolves around a multitribal sept in the Black Forest pulled together by the Margrave Konietzko's alliance of European Garou. The characters, in a quick rundown:  
> Dawnstar: a metis Silver Fang, permitted to live because of a curious prophecy around her birth. Tries to be the sane one.  
> Signe: a Qualmi Bastet, trapped in Russia after the Shadow Curtain fell. Has a cornucopia of traumas.  
> Joy-of-the-Ice: a young Red Talon from Greenland. Happier than any Red Talon should ever be.  
> Ninya: a Siberakh (yes) from a Russianised Samoyed family. Bad at being mythical.  
> Taavi: a Finnish Shadow Lord with a desk job. Was not even supposed to be here today.

“Oh Goddess, sweet Mother, anything but more ice,” Taavi groaned when Dawnstar came to wake him with the news that the lake had frozen overnight.

It had been an unseasonably warm winter in the Black Forest. The elders of the sept, the men and women whom Dawnstar had grown up hearing complain about bygone days, had had much to say about it. Every year worse, they said, every year stranger, further from cycles they knew in their wolf and human and shifter bones. But three nights after she and her pack had returned from the endless blue-white of Franz Josef Land, winter finally breathed its way over the sept’s small lake, stamped it with blue-white of its own.

The night frost sang strangely to Dawnstar, tickled with unexpected familiarity over her new scars and along her twisted arm. She had thought, waking up that morning with those whispers in her skin, that the winter landscape of the permafrosted North had left some mark in her. The battles her new pack had fought, the many deaths they'd skirted, the explosive power of the caern they had unearthed – the power of the pack-bond itself forged in the unforgiving cold crucible of that ice. That perhaps something of those places where Gaia’s love was starkest, least easy to see and understand, would stay with her, with all of them, for good now. The blessing of raw survival.

But they had suffered for this touch, physically and mentally, in the ways of their kind. And Taavi had suffered more than most. So she left the Shadow Lord to his bed and his several blankets, and went by herself down the barely marked trail that led from the sept’s lodgings to the lakeside.

The Black Forest Garou struck a delicate equilibrium with the woods, more so since the Margrave Konietzko had made his European alliance and set one of its centres in this age-old seat of power, opening ancestral lands to tribes from across his domains. The lodgings have changed dramatically even in Dawnstar’s few years. But the lake still had only a single pier to ornament it, stretching out cautious, shy almost in its wooden plainness. Dawnstar walked down to it on human feet, careful not to slip, not to rattle the hanging icicles too hard. She paused at the land-bound edge of the pier, though, because Signe, the Qualmi, was sitting on the far end, watching Dawnstar’s two remaining packmates frolicking on the ice.

Dawnstar watched past her, squinting a little in the crystal of the morning. Joy-of-the Ice, true to his name, danced and spun and skidded around Ninya, all wolf-grin, lolling tongue, clicking claws, white-blue reflections bright in the gray of his fur and painting his crest of blood-red The young Sibherakh meanwhile, serious as ever, maintained her balance with an almost dainty stiffness. Dawnstar wondered how long she would let Joy run literal circles around her before her temper snapped. She kept half an eye out for trouble as she walked down the pier to join Signe. As she lowered herself down by the other woman, Joy was bumping his snout against Ninya’s haunches, shoving her into a slide, tossing his tail with wolf laughter.

“I think,” Signe said quietly, “now I understand why your people won the War.”

Dawnstar started faintly, shifting a little, instinctive, to put more space between her and the cat-shifter. Her withered arm had almost touched Signe’s shoulder, she realised with squirming discomfort. But Signe’s eyes were entirely on the playing Garou. Ninya let out a screeching yelp and spun to snap at Joy’s nose.

“Not for the usual reasons?” Dawnstar offered back, just as quiet. With tremulous humour, she found; Taavi’s Shadow Lord wryness was rubbing off on her. The Qualmi didn’t laugh. Dawnstar realised she still didn’t know if Signe could.

“It was only three days ago.” Signe rocked very slightly where she sat, once, forwards, backwards. She licked her lips once. Then gone. Cat-stillness again. “We fought. We cheated death. We saw wonders. We saved what we could and… could not.” Dawnstar nodded, knowing exactly what the other woman meant by all she said. Or – thinking she knew, not truly certain how much her kind and Signe’s could really share an understanding. “And they… play.” Signe tilted her chin to the ice, to Joy and Ninya, a gray blur and a white blur chasing each other.

Dawnstar hesitated. The need to defend her new packmates was there, but a careless answer would be too easy. “Are you upset with them?”

“Not upset.” Signe seemed surprised at the suggestion. Not in itself surprising, perhaps; Dawnstar had yet to decide if the little Qualmi had Rage in her at all. “No,” she muttered again. “Your people survive. You have… an endurance to you. You fight, and then you play.”

Dawnstar considered that. “I might say that it is your people who are the survivors. We won the War, but you survive…”

“Not the same.” Signe shook her head. “We survived and we continue to have hope. Some Bastet are warriors. But we are not… we aren’t…” another nervous lip-lick.

Then she called out across the ice: “Joy!”

Signe so rarely raised her voice; the Red Talon was attentive at once. He came loping, cheerful, tail swishing and swashing at ease. Ninya came with him, looking relieved at the break in a tussle she had probably been losing. Signe leaned forward from the edge of the pier towards both of them. “Joy, tell me a story about endurance.”

Joy wrinkled an uncertain snout. “Not a tale-singer. Ask Dawnstar-rhya.”

“A story of your tribe. A wolf-story.”

“Wolf-stories aren’t for cats,” Joy-of-the-Ice complained, but the special attention clearly pleased him. He hopped up over the side of the pier, a nimble bundle of young muscles and voluminous coat, and swelled then shrank through his forms until it was his white-toothed, coppery-skinned homid alongside them, legs dangling over the edge. Dawnstar tried not to shudder at his open jacket. “I give a story from home. From Greenland. How my sire died. Biggest wolf in all the packs. So big – “ he threw wiry arms wide – “ so big, in winter he bit a metal bird’s leg. Metal flier with branches that spin?” The Red Talon frowned, unsure.

“A chopper,” Ninya filled in from across the pier, dry.

“A chopper. With humans inside. They shot him sleep medicine. Ha ha! Too big! The bird tries so hard to fly. Another bird full of humans in the air watching, so my sire can’t change. Only hold with wolf teeth. He is heavy! They shot him eight times!” Joy brandished both hands, thumbs tucked in. “Until this medicine is finished. In the end they killed the bird, jumped out, run away. My sire’s pack find my sire sleeping with iron bird’s leg in his teeth. He dies quiet. The death howl is the best. Great glory.” He shook his head, cackling to himself at the others’ stares. “So big, so big…”

Dawnstar nodded, duly impressed .Ninya, gone human to match with the others, was scowling in a combination of envy and doubt. “That’s insane. What did you do with the chopper?”

Joy grinned brilliantly. “We ate it.”

“No you didn’t.” The Siberakh girl rolled her eyes. She sat herself on the opposite end of the pier at Dawnstar’s side, back straight, fingers fiddling in their gloves. “Now I will tell you a proper story about Garou endurance. I’m not meant to – this is Siberakh lore. But I know I can trust you, Signe, since your kin are friends to mine across the strait. And you, Dawnstar, since you are the best Silver Fang I know.” She glanced at the pointedly unmentioned Joy, but cleared her throat, and continued with her arms crossed. “The Uktena claim that the role and lore of the Bane Tenders belongs to their tribe, but my people know better. The first, and the greatest of Bane Tenders was one of my kin, the Arctic peoples, a woman shaman whose only name now is Soothes the First Cry.

“For she was there from the first – on the first night after the Gauntlet fell, and the worlds of matter and spirit were rent from each other. After the Gauntlet fell, every living creature in the world was crying for what they’d lost, but the great shamaness heard one voice in all the cries. She listened to it and tracked it into Gaia’s coldest places, far further North than we have been, and there she found an unimaginably great Bane. It had been born from the scream of Gaia itself when the world was sundered. Soothes the First Cry could not fight it, but she could beat her drum gently and sing to it, calm the screaming it had put into the minds of all living things. And so she has been doing since the dawn of the world, singing a sweet song to soothe that great hurt. No matter the pain, her song is full of Gaia’s love and laughter. It will be that way forever.”

“Even when the Apocalypse comes?” Joy challenged, unaware of the others’ fascinated silence.

Ninya nodded sombrely. “In the end of days, she will sing her release sweeter than ever. And that will be her defiance.”

She stuck out her chest, smug and satisfied at their response. Dawnstar didn’t try to hide her look of rapt interest; even if Ninya forbade its further telling, she was glad that she had heard the story. Both stories. Simple or ornate, she felt the heart in both of them. It had beat within her own breast when she and her pack fought in the ever-ice, under the long Arctic night.

Joy, true to form, was quick to shake off his own impressionable response. He leaped off the pier and was already on four paws when he landed, padding around to pull at Ninya’s boot. “You tell a good story. But you still don’t walk ice as well as me!”

“Stop it, you skunk-bear!” The girl snapped, high-pitched imperious, and let herself be pulled down and to her own wolf-skin. She surged at Joy and he bounced back from her, forepaws in the air, dancing back from her striking jaws. They went away over the ice, sliding and skittering, filling the winter-still woods with the sounds of daring and play. Dawnstar rubbed her withered hand with her whole one as she watched them. On three legs she was clumsy in the ice and snow, an embarrassment to the majesty of her tundra ancestors, but pack was pack and so she thought they might forgive it...

“Endurance,” Signe whispered at her side. “Now, do you see?”

Dawnstar lingered again. “I’m not sure.”

“ _She will sing her release,_ ” the Qualmi said, a soft fierce longing in her voice – perhaps the most emotion Dawnstar had ever heard from her, outside of the raw fear and grief that had been all their share in Franz Josef Land. “No one endures like the wolves do, in celebration. Even death celebrated. We Bastet, and all Skinchangers, survive as long as we have hope. You Garou, even when you have no hope – you survive. Because of what you _are_.”

She stopped, twitching slightly through her cat-silence, looking down at her hands as though embarrassed and astonished to find herself saying so many impassioned words at once. Just as stunned, Dawnstar tried not to stare. She had never thought of it. She fingered the feeble cord of her right arm, limp in her lap. Few lives were bereft of hope as that of a metis among the Silver Fangs, even one with prophecy to light her road. She had never thought of hope, just as she had never thought of a pack of her own, much less of leading one. She had never thought of why she survived.

She looked away from the Bastet and at her two young packmates. Joy, the bright-eyed, bright-smiled offspring of a dying tribe, a dying species. Ninya, the city-grown Siberakh, with her torn roots and their broken promises. Perhaps she could have had no others. But then perhaps no others but them could have gone into the ice and come out, for all that they could not have saved, and all that they had.

She swallowed lightly. Looked at Signe. Found her faint smile that spread a balm over the power of the moment. “I don’t know what Taavi would have said about that – “

“Taavi declines to comment.” The Shadow Lord’s voice, still tired, alerted them both to his coming down the trail. He was wrapped in his great coat with a patched blanket thrown over his shoulders to top it off, sniffling and sighing in the misting air, heavy on his limping foot as he went down the pier to join them. But join them he did, crouching by Dawnstar in lieu of sitting on the slick dark wood. “More ice, Maya? Really?”

“I did not make you get out of bed,” Dawnstar protested. She pulled a little at his blanket, and he let her have a wing of it to throw over her own back.

“No.” The mist of Taavi’s breath froze in his beard. He brushed at it and coincidentally hid his wrinkled nose and glum grin. ”But you brought the pack out here. _Perkele._ Will it be ice for good? Is that why you two were talking about enduring?”

Dawnstar thought about the tingle in her bones when she woke to the morning frost, about celebrating what all others feared. “It might be. We did tell Sable we’d take her as our totem, remember.” The Finn swore again. She flicked his arm gently. “As long as the pack lasts. It might not be long. I don’t know if – “ she looked across him as Signe, who was playing with a loose frill from the blanket. “Bastet don’t run in packs, do they?”

“Qualmi can’t stand each other,” Signe mumbled.

“Good thing the rest of us are not Qualmi,” Taavi said airily.

“You are Garou.” She licked her lips. “You fight battles my kind can’t.”

“Signe,” Dawnstar said softly. “You’ve more than proven your worth with us.”

“Not worth, not about worth. Not the same. We are not…” on strange, sudden impulse, the Qualmi leaned across the surprised Taavi’s body. She reached out a hand, fingertips peeking out of her glove. 

On strange impulse, Dawnstar reached back, caught the hand in her own.

Signe started, then stilled, then breathed in.

“I will tell a story,” she said. “A Qualmi riddle. One day Eagle wanted to fly from one end of the land to the other. He spread his wings and flew from where the sun rose to where it set, and all the while he felt heavy, very heavy. He did not know why, but Eagle is strong, and he never thought to stop, until he was almost in sight of the place where the sun sets. There stood a man with a bow, who had waited for him. He shot at Eagle. But out of nowhere, Raven appeared. Raven caught the arrow in his claws, swift and sure, and pecked out the eyes of the man. Eagle was saved.

“’Raven,’ said Eagle in amazement, ‘you are so small, how did you fly all the way here? How do you still have the strength to save me?'

“And do you know what Raven said?” the Qualmi craned her neck, looked at Dawnstar, “Raven said – “

Dawnstar found herself nodding. Answering. “Raven said, ’you were carrying me on your back.'”

Signe’s fingers tightened around hers. She nodded back.

"Carry me there, sister," she whispered, "and I will be strong, in the end."

When she slipped her hand back it was a feathery breath of a passage. The cat-shifter slid dainty off the end of the pier, landed soundlessly on the ice. She shook herself into her lynx form, swivelled her ear-tufts and spread her great paws like snowshoes, padding effortlessly to the leaping, slipping wolves. Still from a good distance away, she pounced on Joy, taking him by utter surprise. They rolled across the ice and collided with Ninya, yipping and yowling, outraged and gleeful.

Watching them, Dawnstar leaned onto Taavi’s shoulder, into the shared comfort under the blanket.

“Tell me a story about endurance, Taavi,” she said.

The Shadow Lord sniffed uncertainly, but cleared his throat. “Well,” he answered. “Once there were four Garou and a Bastet who had no business living through a visit to the darkest, coldest place on Gaia’s green hills, in _December_. But they did. And then their pack leader took them playing on a frozen lake, and they went and did that, too. Because after everything they'd been through, they were a pack, and sometimes that means suffering together."

He leaned back, shoulder to shoulder. Then sniffed again, half a sigh.

“And because endurance means deciding to enjoy your trials, apparently.”

Dawnstar laughed. For the first time in days, she felt truly warm.

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s just right.”

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, lynxes and wolves playing in the snow together are nice?


End file.
